Genealogy in New York State (Gen-NYS-L) is still going strong, but most of the actionseems to have moved off to various websites now that the internet is more accessible.

Just sent this birthday note to the list:

Today is the 10th Birthday of this mailing list!

Below is part of the first message I sent through tothe mailing list. It was initially hosted on my $2000Pentium 386/33 with 4M of memory and 120M disk runninga very early version of the free, open source operatingsystem Linux and connected to the internet over a 56kb dialup, usually in the evenings after work.

----------

Marc Nozell (nozell@wildcat.MV.COM)Mon, 4 Dec 1995 21:41:40 -0500

Hi, I'm the gen-nys-l mailing list owner.

At the request of Jerry Dafoe <jcdafoe @ix.netcom.com>, I've createdthe GEN-NYS-L mailing list for the discussion of genealogical researchin New York State.

----------

Since then it moved to RootsWeb.com in 1996 and has had over27,721 messages distributed to subscribers. Thanks to RootsWeb.comfor supporting and allowing it be so productive.

As of this evening, there are 423 subscribers to GEN-NYS-L and 208 subscribers to GEN-NYS-D.

I just got spam from a phisher allegedly from tax-returns@irs.gov saying I have a $571.94 tax refund that needs to be claimed in 12 days.

The URL had me fooled for a second -- it looks like a link to govbenefits.gov with a longidentifier. It turns out that the badguys are using a poorly secured redirect page (externalLink.jhtml) on govbenefits.gov to send people to porterfam.org. Of course the resulting page asks for SSN, credit card number, etc -- all the things needed for identity fraud.

http://www.govbenefits.gov/govbenefits/externalLink.jhtml?url=h%74t%70:%2F%2F%77%77%77%2Eporterfam%2E%6F%72%67%2F2+005%2F%3F_cmd=/cgibin/2005/trefund/id=96596,00(copy and paste this link in your browser address bar)

12 days left to apply for your refund. You may not receive your refund as quickly as you expected. A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example, a name and Social Security number listed on the tax return may not match the IRS records. You may have failed to electronically sign the return or applied after the deadline.

This email has been sent by the Internal Revenue Service, a bureau of the Department of the Treasury.

I installed the following software on the new HP laptop -- they areall from the CD that went home with you.

OpenOffice V2.0 -- This is a complete, free replacement for Microsoft Office tools like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It will let you open documents that people may send you that those tools.

GAIM -- free alternative to AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, etc's own version of IM or Chat programs. You still need free accounts on those services (and you already have them for Google, Yahoo and AOL), but you don't need to have 3 different programs running to chat with people on each of those IM servers. GAIM connects for your to each of them.

FireFox -- free alternative to using Microsoft Internet Explorer (also known as MSIE, the blue E that I removed from at least Dad's desktop). MSIE has a history of being plagued by virus, spyware, etc. Firefox is not completely immune, but much less of a risk. You may hear people refer to Mozilla browser, Firefox is a version of that.

There are other free programs on the CD -- it is called TheOpenCD(http://www.theopencd.org) and you can pass it on or give copies toyour friends -- to look at the other stuff on there to to see if thereis anything interesting to you on it. You can install them on theoffice PCs or the desktop PC at home.

I also setup a number of free accounts for both of you.

Email -- Instead of using Microsoft Outlook and getting your mail from Roadrunner or Frontier (which ever you end up choosing for email), just get your email from google's free GMAIL service. Use any computer and go to http://www.gmail.com/ and log to do your email. (Account info below)

IM -- Dad and I got accounts for IM Chat accounts on AOL (sometimes you see it referred to as AIM), Google Talk and Yahoo!. (account info below) The GAIM program is all setup for each of those account. Just go to the menu Tool s then Account and click 'Online' for your accounts. It already has the password information set there. This will let you chat with my kids who use AOL, Lori that uses Yahoo! and me who actually has accounts on all of them.

Photos -- You already had an account on Flickr (now part of Yahoo!,http://www.flickr.com). You used your old AOL.COM address to create an account. and there is a way to change the email address to match your Yahoo! account. Dad and I also installed FlickrUploadr and there should be a link of the desktop. Double click on it to start it and then use the file explorer to drag and drop photos from your hard drive (or CD or Camera) to FlickrUploadr. Then press the Upload button and the photos will be copied to http://www.flickr.com/ where people can see them.

A note to HP: please take this first-place win here, where second-place votes were less than half of what you received, as proof that we likeyour boxes, so you can cut out the pointless marketing poo-flinging atSun, already.

Photo of DL380 and sidebar: "Last year, the HP ProLiant BL20p G2 won theEditor's Choice Award for Server Hardware. Now the readers are singing the ProLiant's praises."

HOUSTON - Hurricane Rita roared toward the Texas and Louisiana coasts early Friday, a major Category 4 storm that spurred a traffic-snarled exodus toward higher ground and fears it could cripple the heart of the nationâ€™s petrochemical industry.SPAM PRODUCT href

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Today was our 15th anniversary and we had a nice lunch at Pickety Place in Mason. There was this cool home-decorated truck with sea shells, horseshoe crabs, rays, etc in the parking lot. Delivering salmon for the entree?

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

A friend was asking today about how to improve her site's ranking in google and it got me thinking of adding Google's SiteMap and gave Arne Brachhold's WordPress plugin a try. It was amazingly simple to install and use.

Tuesday, August 9, 2005

In Ubuntu 'hoary' it appears that it isn't possible to set up a printer separator (sometimes called a burst page or Job Sheet) for a CUPs print queue. The Ubuntu print gui, (System->Administration->Printing) just doesn't expose that option. Usually it can be set in though the web interface to CUPs (localhost:631), but that is disabled.

To enable a JobSheet, edit the file /etc/cups/printers.conf to looksomething like this:

The unclassified refers to a file in /usr/share/cups/banners/ that is just a chunk of PostScript that gets prepended to the print jobs. If you feel like hacking PostScript, you can create your own burst page.

Monday, August 8, 2005

A Lamer is a jargon or slang name applied to individuals thought to be lacking in maturity, social skills, technical competence or intelligence. It is applied in a variety of contexts, though the proliferation of computer-mediated communication media such as IRC or BBSes may be partly responsible for bringing the term into common parlance.

Friday, July 29, 2005

I've been using RSS readers for a couple of years now to try to manage the 'River of News'.

This roughly follows the order in which I explored the world of aggregators.

AmphetaDesk -- web-based, runs on a server somewhere, perl-based. A nice solid news aggregator. There is a patch, AmphetaOutlines that improves the look-n-feel which I used. The only downside is it only supports RSS and not ATOM. It looks like RSS is going to win, but there are some sites out there (notably google's blogspot) that only provide ATOM feeds. I've used Amphetadesk the longest so far.

I attended the first meeting of the new NH Python SIG (PySIG) in Manchester last night. About 13 folks interested in programming in python.

My two pet projects that I'd like to write in python are "pull info from a spreadsheet and set title, description, tags, etc on specific photos already hosted on Flickr.com" (to support this genealogy project) and "pull info from a Zoph (nice, but defunct) web/MySQL-based photo organizer and dump it into the next great photo organizer (F-Stop? something else?) without loosing too much data"

Thursday, July 21, 2005

I've been running Debian/Sarge (now the stable branch) on my laptop for quite a while now and its time to try a new distro for dailyl use -- Ubuntu. This week I've been running Ubuntu 'Hoary' and the transition has been very smooth.

The only configuration issue was I wanted to use ALSA on this HP Compaq nc6000 laptop. The install did detect the sound device, but did separate the speaker fromthe headphone controls.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

The 138th Annual William Bull & Sarah Wells picnic is coming up in the next few weeks and I've been exchanging email with some distant cousins about ways to improve participation with the Bull Association and contribute genealogy info.

If you have any photos or scans of images having to do with the Bull picnic or any of the Bull descendants, please get a free flickr.com account and join the groups below. Once you have joined those groups, you'll be able to add your photos to the following groups:

Monday, July 4, 2005

In MemoriamReuben CummingsJune 25, 1761 September 13, 1776Merrimack's Only Casualty of the American Revolutionary WarAt age 14, enlisted as Minute ManFought at Battle of Bunker Hill june 17, 1775Promoted to Drummer July 20, 1776At age 15, he died and was buriedin the area of Ft. Ticonderoga

HP has set an industry-first milestone by shipping more than 1 million Linux servers to customers since 1998, 45 percent more than any other major hardware vendor.

HP has led the worldwide Linux server market for 29 consecutive quarters. In the first quarter of 2005, HP grew 2.5 percentage points faster than the market in units on a year-over-year basis, shipped nearly 10 times as many Linux servers as Sun, led IBM by almost 8 percentage points in quarterly revenue share and outpaced Dell in both units and revenue.

I was tripping down memory lane and dug out some photos from RPI. Here is a fairlygood one of the Chrinitoid I took graduation weekend 1986. Okay, it was taken with one of those cheap-ass Kodak Disc cameras, but hey, there aren't may photos of it.

I'm trying to convince Spencer and Griffin geotagging a cemetery closer to the house would makea great summer project -- using digital camera, GPS, using the PC, helping genealogists, and of course, the possibility of fame -- hopefully will be enough to get them interested.

Monday, May 23, 2005

I usually run debian/sarge on my laptop, but tonight it is booted to Ubuntu 'Hoary Hedgehog' and wanted iPodder running in this environment too.

The current 'released' version of iPodder today is v2.0rc3 for Linux.

First off, go grab and install the the kit from http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/

You'll need to use python2.3 instead of the default python which is v2.4. I already had it installed, but you many need to install it. Also the older version of the xmms python library needed to be installed, but the current version of libwxgtk2.5.3-python is needed.

The commands to install those packages is:

sudo apt-get install python2.3 python2.3-xmms libwxgtk2.5.3-python

Finally the PYTHONPATH needs to be extended to pick up the wx 2.5.3 libraries.

Either edit /usr/bin/iPodder to look like this, or just do it manually when you want to run iPodder: